Sugihara was not the only govt official of Imperial Japan involved in saving Jews during this period (I've posted and written comments about this here, here, here, here, here and here.

Thanks for the links. I've taken a look at them and will post something up in other post in response.

As to why none of this is "played up" basically it involves explaining to the world that not all aspects of Imperial Japan during this time were pure evil and that is a bit too much for most Westerners to digest. Unfortunately even some highly educated people I know, when I tell them this they can't get past "but Japan was allied with the nazis!"

Things do seem to be a little more complicated than "but Japan was allied with the nazis!" after doing some reading on my own about this. After doing this reading, I believe that the Japanese government at the time was not entirely advocating non-discrimination and pro-Jewish policies purely on humanitarian grounds. I'll lay out what I've found in another post on this thread.

According to the video description, the video was taken on Okunoshima (大久野島). In case you don't already know about it, the island used to have a top secret poison gas factory during WW2. The factory ruins have been turned into a museum where it shows the equipment used and tells of its history.

His story is actual in one of the more popular (and newer) JHS textbooks and it's used for some speech contests, I believe. So he's played up at least a bit. Maybe it's a recent thing?

I admit I spoke too soon about how Sugihara's story is not played up. I started doing serious reading about the story and found that it's more certain parts of his story have not been played up rather than he himself. I'll be making a separate post about it in this thread.

The speech contest piece says he had to leave his post because the Nazis invaded, though. I'm pretty sure it was the Soviets that pushed him out...

From all of the sources I've seen so far, they all indicate that it was indeed the Soviets who gave him a deadline to vacate the embassy in Lithuania after they annexed it in 1940.

Sugihara was later asked to resign by Japan's Foreign Ministry for defying the rules of a government then allied with Germany and that a year later was at war with the United States. He died in obscurity in 1986.

Now I know why Sugihara isn't played up so much in Japan as he could be. Thanks for the link.

Hindsight is 20/20 but this is why you create a throwaway account for the sole purpose of providing info to just this thread if you're worried about that. You're free to disclose or not disclose what you like but it would have been helpful for everyone here if you had.

Well, if they're not going to be good little corporate slaves/consumers and they're not going to have kids then this is probably the only legal avenue left to make them "useful" to "society". I mean, they are one reason why we have to resort to expanding the foreign intern program to keep the number of bodies available and prevent wages from going up due to low supply and high demand. They already know how they'll get fucked over at work but green foreigners won't. Plus they can quit easily while foreigners can't.

Corps deferring investment in favor if lending the government money at near-0 interest rates is really the only thing keeping them semi-solvent. So they're really stuck between a rock and a hard place here.

Is this were the money of companies with large internal reserves are now in? I've also heard talk about taxing the reserves directly in order to force companies to spend. Do you know anything about this and what effects this might have?